Shendandoah

Recently, Brian and I took a road trip to Virginia (the Shenandoah area). It was an amazing trip, and I very literally fell in love with the western side of Virginia. The trip would require a huge post, so I've decided to split it up into 3 parts. the first part is Shenandoah National Park. I had no idea, first of all, that there was a National Park so close to us. I thought Acadia was the closest park and it's 12 hours away. This park is only 5 hours away, so we decided to check it out. It's awesome! It's got several different kinds of hikes, from waterfalls to bouldering. We had a blast.

The first hike we did was Old Rag (we never figured out why it's called that). It's an intensive hike with lots of bouldering (so much fun!) to an overlook.

The hike started out more gradual, like above. It was beautiful. Spring was full-blown there, so it was a nice change to the every other day freeze in NY this Spring.

Then the rocks got bigger...

and bigger!

There were beautiful overlooks. I loved the hills there...well, I guess there aren't technically hills. They're the appalachian mountains, but they're hills compared to the Mountains in the west. But they were beautiful.

Then the bouldering began. This is something Brian and I both enjoy. The constant obstacles are such a fun challenge.

We followed the blue blazes as we scaled the boulders.

This was the coolest rock we ran into. We could of gotten on top, but geologic time includes now, so I wasn't going to risk it.

We reached the top, and a beautiful overlook of the valley in all directions.

We camped in the backcountry among these boulders. It was fun; such a cool spot.

There were so many hikes to do in the park that we didn't even scratch the surface, but we did do the White Oak Canyon trail, which followed a creek down a gorge, so there were several waterfalls.

Lots of photo ops.

At any rate, we just fell in love with Shenandoah National Park. Who knew such a great park was so close to home? We'll definitely be back!